


hot chocolate voice (with honey)

by orphan_account



Category: IT (2017)
Genre: Childhood Sexual Abuse, M/M, Rape, Sonia Kaspbrak's A+ Parenting, aged-up, doctor! eddie, eddie has kids (mentioned), i actually can't stand her and that's most of the reason i even wrote this, post-university, we fucked and then i never heard from you again you asshole au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-05
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2019-02-28 12:26:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13271433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: November 17, 2018:Dr. Edward Kaspbrak gives a TED talk in a new series about successful LGBTQ+ people in successful jobsEddie Gets a call from Richie, learns something about Bill's ten-year-long cold-case missing brother (that he wishes he hadn't learned) and learns that Richie was in love with him, and that he was in love with Richie, and maybe, just maybe, there might be something there. (even after all this time)





	hot chocolate voice (with honey)

**Author's Note:**

> i just REALLY wanted eddie to give a TED talk and I really don't know why

_"Do you know how many diseases are linked to being queer? Please, Eddie-Bear, you can't do this to me, you can't do this to your poor mother! What if you get sick? What if you get sick because you left me for some faggot who's going to get you killed? What are you going to do? Some dirty faggot - like those boys you always hung out with when you a child. This is their fault. That jew and that nigger and that boy who did horrible things to his own brother - this is their fault! They tainted you, Eddie-Bear! They took away my son! They made a sick, queer, faggot who doesn't love his mother!"_

_"You're not my son."_

_"You're a stranger. Get out of my house."_

It's easy to see someone being abused in a TV show, or a movie, or read about it in a book and say, 'That would never happen to me' or 'I would never let anyone treat me like that,' but the reality of it is: you probably have. 

You let your brother talk down to you, or a partner manipulate you, or a parent control you. Anyone who tells you that these aren't signs of abuse probably couldn't shove their own head farther up their ass if they tried. 

_(Laughter from audience)_

My mother was a hypochondriac and a mysophobe. She told me that the feeling I got in my chest when I ran or laughed wasn't the childish glee of spending time with friends, but severe, dangerous asthma. 

I used an inhaler for close to ten years. 

_(Pause, Mr. Kaspbrak takes a deep breath before continuing)_

She bought me glasses - bifocals, actually - when I was eleven, and a fanny pack to store my medication when I was eight. She taught me about grey water and the ways that a cut can be infected and the dangers of spending time in dirt or grass. She taught me that the human body was a terrifying, horrible thing. She taught me that my body was dirty and ugly and wrong - that it was sick, and that she was my salvation for becoming clean and strong and right. 

When I tell people that I grew up with an abusive mother, they expect words like the ones I told you at the beginning. What they don't expect is that my mother called me a faggot, my boyfriend a filthy jew and my best friend a nigger exactly once, and she didn't say it at all like I told you. 

My mother's abuse was casual. It was quiet and easy, like my breathing wasn't. She would watch me as I ate and commented when I lost or gained weight. She ensured that I always had my medication and insisted upon knowing my whereabouts at all times. She didn't let me leave the house without kissing her on the cheek, and she regularly looked through my things without telling me. She would randomly restrict my ability to spend time with my friends, locking me in the house, sometimes in my room, in the suffocating heat of a summer in Maine, and let me wallow in my sweat. 

These things are fairly innocent, if you weren't in the middle of them. I've had people shake and their heads and say to me, "That wasn't abuse - she was just overprotective." I've even had people become angry with me, and listened to them tell me that I no right to say that I had been abused because I had no idea what abuse was really like. 

Let me let you all in on a little secret: abuse is not a pissing contest, or a comparason of dick sizes. Joe with the little micropenis in the third row over there wasn't less abused than Michael with the foot-long in the back row.  _(Audience laughs)_ My - Richie, who boasted his dick size to me doesn't have a monopoly on abuse, either, just because his dad really liked to shatter bottles on his son. No one has a monopoly on abuse. 

My mother did a lot of things to me, but she also insisted on being in the room while I showered or bathed until I moved out. She would have me strip in the living room to inspect me for cuts, rashes or bruises, and if she found anything out of place, she would feed me pills - typically a double or triple dose of anxiety medication, which knocked me the fuck out. I often woke up after these incidences in my mother's bed, naked, with no memory of what had happened in the four hours I had lost. I don't know what happened during those hours - I'll never regain the - uh - the memories, but I remember how much my body ached after I woke up, and that - no matter how long I showered afterwards, with my mother still in the room - I never felt clean. 

It would take me another seven years to feel  _clean_. 

_(Pause)_

I'm kind of jumping all over the place, and I'm sorry about that, but I - um - totally forgot to prepare before I arrived, like an hour ago, so I wrote this whole fucking thing on the plane. Luckily, one thing my mother didn't misdiagnose me with was an eidetic memory, so that's something. 

_(Audience laughs. Mr Kaspbrak stops for a drink of water)_

Actually, my eidetic memory is what got me into medical school - all standardized tests are easier when you can't forget every detail of every textbook you've ever read. It's also incredibly frustrating. I flunked my first test in medical school because I'd made the mistake of reading the  _entire_  textbook, which was probably around twelve hundred pages long, and I couldn't figure out where each piece of information I needed was stored. I learned very quickly that the key to eidetic memory was in the details, in the storage. It's easier to find information in a file if there's only a hundred pages to sort through instead of a thousand, or two thousand, and it's the same thing with my brain. I have to be selective. 

People always point out to me that eidetic memory is 'a blessing and a curse' because you can recall everything, including traumatic events. I always find this funny, because when was the last time you forgot about a traumatic event? Did you forget your childhood bully, or your abusive parent, or your mean sibling or your homophobic uncle or your racist mother? Of course you didn't! The human brain is very good at containing trauma, at holding it in the memory, but slowly detaching meaning from it. My memories may be more detailed than yours, but I don't remember everything flawlessly. I'm not  _magical_. I forget my phone at home and I forget to pack underwear when I go on trips and I forget to feed my kids sometimes. 

_(Pause)_

That was a joke, guys, and I'm really fucking offended nobody laughed -

 _(Audience begins laughing_ )

I can't believe you all thought that I was bad enough dad that I forgot to feed my kids. Fuck you all. 

_(Audience and mr. Kaspbrak laugh. Mr. Kaspbrak shakes his head)_

People hear about me talking about my mom, and then they hear about me going to medical school and they assume the two must be correlated. 

They're not wrong, of course, I wouldn't have gone to medical school without my mother, but she wasn't why I went. I went to medical school because she taught me to hate the human body - to be disgusted by all of its processes, all of its strange quirks and preferences, all the ways it ticks and mumbles and all the strange things it does. She taught me to be afraid of disease and illness and mental health and cancer and atrophy and infection. 

So I went to medical school to learn why the human body was so inherently valuable, why it was an evolutionary advantage over millions upon millions of other species in the world. 

I went to medical school to learn about AIDS slash HIV, because I grew up with my mother breathing down my neck about how dangerous it was to be queer. I went to learn about hypochondria and abuse and psychology and vaccines. I went to learn about how many germs are  _actually_ in a person's mouth - it's about a hundred thousand individual bateria per tooth and about thirty two million per mouth, you're welcome, by the way, have fun macking on your partner tonight - and how to be protected from STIs. 

 _That's_  why I went to medical school. 

_(Pause)_

Sorry, I just wanted to get some assumptions off the table. 

I'd been talking about how it took me seven years to get clean, right? Saying it like that always makes me sound like a junkie, but in some ways, I was. Taking double doses of anxiety medication whenever my mom decided I wasn't clean enough and all sorts of other kinds of medication you don't need is really fucking bad for you. I was addicted, basically, to the antidepressants, anti-anxiety and heartburn medication I'd been taking for most of my life. I moved out of my mom's house when I was seventeen, in my senior year, and went to go live with my best friend on his farm, for the last few months of highschool.  _That_  was the first time she called me a fag, Mike a 'nigger' and Stan a 'filthy jew.' 

That was November 17, 2010, so it's been just over ten years since I last spoke to my mom. 

Those last months of high school, I was still taking the medication. I had already abandoned my mom, I couldn't abandon my medication, too. Besides, I would have to talk to her to have my prescriptions canceled and I was even less willing to do that than I was to stop taking the medication. 

I got accepted into UPenn - for their pre-med program, and I graduated  _magnum cum laude_ with my MD when I was twenty-four, which is pretty much why I was asked to do this TED talk for you guys. I'm the youngest-ever graduate from UPenn with an MD, and people like that I'm also cute and queer. 

_(Audience laughs. Inaudible audience member says something and Dr. Kaspbrak laughs and winks)_

You guys don't see enough LGBTQ people in the media - you don't see us succeeding in jobs that haven't been disguished as almost purely 'for queer people.' There are gay actors, gay musicians, gay dancers - but you don't get to see gay doctors and nurses and teachers, gay people being gay and being normal.

I grew up with an abusive mother. I started going out with my first boyfriend when I was thirteen, gave my first handjob when I was fourteen, my first blowjob was I was fifteen and had sex for the first time almost right after. He and I broke up when I was sixteen - he's the Jewish boy I mentioned - Stan - and he's still one of my best friends. There was a boy in university who I roomed with for years, who I had a huge thing for, but never dated. I had hookups all through university and didn't date anyone seriously until I dated my partner for three months, got engaged and got married before our six month anniversary and had two kids before we celebrated two years of marriage. 

My partner and I are no longer partners - big surprise there - but we split time with our kids - half and half custody. 

Our divorce was sad, but not the sadness of losing someone you're in love - sort of the detached sadness of watching a heartbreaking movie - which is why we were getting divorced. 

I wonder what it's like for my kids, sometimes. To have one parent be a gay man - hi, by the way, I'm Eddie Kaspbrak and I'm  _super_  fucking gay - and the other be non-binary and queer. 

I worry that they get picked on for it, or that people say unkind things. They might. I have no idea - my kids are both chatty, but they're also five and six and have no idea what it means to be mean. The point is that Caspar and I have kids - and that our kids will grow up knowing that you don't have to be who everyone thinks you have to be. Caspar is a successful business person - they own stocks in Google and work as a part of Google's financial advisary team. I'm a successful doctor, who teaches at one of the most renound universities in the world. But beyond that, Caspar uses 'they' and our kids call them 'mom' and 'dad' interchangeably, which has become 'ma-pa' because when five-year-olds decide something is law, it is law. Though them and I are split, Caspar and I are still kind - most of the time - and we love our children. We both date other people, and our kids have seen their parents as purely human, something I never got to see in my mother, and something Caspar never got to see in theirs. 

The point is, you are the life you create for yourself. You might be sitting in this audience and listening to me talk and relating to every word I say, thanking whoever that you got to hear someone who sounded like you talk on a stage like this. Or maybe you're sitting there thinking that I'm a fucking quack and whoever let me attend medical school was a fucking lunatic and well, you're not wrong. 

 _(Audience laughs_ ). 

Fifteen-year-old Eddie Kaspbrak, who woke up naked next to his mother, was terrifying, I'm told, in his determination to make it to medical school, to leave Fuck-All, Maine, and grow up to be someone who mattered, someone who was more than queer, and short, and abused. 

I'm still queer, still short, still dealing with the effects of abuse, but I'm also 27, a doctor, a professor, a dad, a divorcee, a big fucking fan of the Beatles and David Bowie and Ella Fitzgerald, a reader, a writer, and someone who would literally marry Roxane Gay if she wasn't a woman. I might do it anyways, I swear to God. 

_(Audience laughs. Someone shouts 'Me too, Eddie!)_

The point is - you're okay. In this moment, you were okay. 

Or, I hope you are 'cause I made some pretty shitty jokes. And I've been getting looks from the guy in charge of camera one over here and I  _just_ realized that I probably wasn't supposed to swear? 

_(Audience laughs)_

Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm leaving now. 

_(Mr Kaspbrak stands and waves, setting down his mic and taking his bottle of water. He brushes past an assistant and swings a child onto his hip)_

"Professor Kaspbrak?" 

"Yeah?"

"Call for you on line one."

"From?"

"Sonia Kaspbrak."

Pause. 

"Thank you, Clark."

The light on line one flashes pink over and over and over and he sighs. He lets his head fall forward into his hand. He'd forgotten, when he'd booked his flight and when he'd said yes to doing the talk that it was the day he left his mother. He'd realized while he was speaking, and felt a little bit of dread wash over him. His mother was going to call. She always did. 

And it didn't matter that it had been ten years since he had last seen her, because she always made his gut turn and his heartbeat pound. 

He picked up the phone, and pressed the line button. 

"I told you not to call me at work, Sonia." 

"What the fuck, Eddie? I may be fucking your mom but that doesn't mean I sunk into that glorious woman and actually  _became_ her." 

 _Definitely not Sonia_. 

Eddie starts and stops. " _Richie_?"

"The one and fucking only, Dr. Kaspbrak." Richie's voice is light and warm, free of Voices. He sounds a little nervous - there's a slight waver beneath his words, a bit of apprehension shaking his vowels between his teeth. "By the way, the whole being an incredibly successful doctor slash professor only makes you hotter, my dear."

Eddie makes an indignant noise. "I was definitely hot before, you asshole."

Richie hums in fake contemplation and Eddie can picture him tapping his chin, sliding his glasses up his nose. "You're right."

There's a softness to his voice that isn't what Eddie was expecting - it's an internal voice, one that Eddie usually hears when they're high, or when it's late at night and everyone else has fallen asleep. Or--

Eddie feels a blush rise to his cheeks and rolls his eyes.

Richie's not even in the same  _room_ and all he can think about is the sharp jut of his hipbones and how big his hands were, about the defined lines of his neck and the hollowed bowls of his collarbones and the space above his breastbone. He gets stuck in it. In Richie's dark hair against his mouth and between his legs, in bad pick-up lines and an unending stream of praise and words that had Eddie blushing and whining in equal measure. He thinks about the first time they fucked, pressed together in Richie's bed, the day before the last final of their undergraduate degrees, Eddie at twenty and Richie at twenty two, and how distant those years had seemed. He'd been on his back the first time, his wrists in Richie's (big) hands and his legs around his waist, on his hands and knees the second and third times. He'd ridden Richie the fourth time, sprawled across the his thighs, tilting his head back against his shoulder and mouthing at a lean neck. He'd ridden Richie the fifth time, too, sat on his lap and kissed him as they both moaned. 

He'd woken up next morning to a warm coffee on his bedside table and a note saying something about an early final. 

That was seven years ago, and Eddie hasn't seen him since. 

"What the  _fuck_ , Richard?" And it comes out so angry, so sharp and so vulnerable that he ignores the part of him that wants to laugh at the shitty reference that would have certainly, under different circumstances, made Richie laugh. 

He doesn't laugh. Neither of them do. 

"Unless you got kidnapped by a motherfucking killer clown, I don't want to hear whatever shitty excuse you've lined up for flirting with me for  _two years_ , fucking me for  _a day straight_  and then  _never speaking to me again_." 

"I'm sorry, Eddie." 

Eddie closes his eyes. He breathes out, sharp and fast, a bit of a sob and a bit of a something-else and leans his head into his hand. 

He remembers Richie pointing out that he only did that when he was upset. He remembers paying enough attention to Richie to realize that he did the opposite - he tilted his head back, like the moon and the stars could save him. 

"No," Eddie says, and he barely recognizes his own voice, soft and heady - like warm hot chocolate made with honey. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't - I have no right to be angry with you." 

Richie laughs, and it's a bitter thing that hurts, just a little. "Yes, you do." 

Eddie pauses. "Well, you're right, I do, but I shouldn't have... shouted?"

"You're still short, angry and gay, Eds, I'd've been more surprised if you hadn't."

Eddie rolls his eyes. "Fuck off, Tozier." But his voice doesn't fit the words. He sounds like hot chocolate again. It's so foreign he almost doesn't realize why until Richie makes a sound like an admission and all Eddie wants to do is ask what's wrong and if he can help. He hasn't heard his hot chocolate voice (Richie's name for it, too, he'd forgotten that) since the last time he saw Richie. 

"I saw your talk," Richie says and Eddie listens to him swallow. It's the showy swallow he does when he flirts. 

"Yeah?" 

"Yeah. It was good - amazing, actually. And I - I - I remembered that she used to call you, everyday on the anniversary of the day you left and I remembered how much you hated it. So I just..."

"Called." 

For a split second, Eddie wants to hit him. He wants to scream and berate him, wants to slap him across the face and demand why he dares to be so  _fucking_ caring. But then he remembers the freckles on Richie's shoulders and forearms and the slick of his mouth against his own. 

He sighs. "Fuck, 'Chee." 

A choked noise falls from Richie and through the telephone line. 

_Fuck, 'Chee, please._

_You're so fucking pretty when you beg, Eddie._

Eddie flushes. He coughs. "Sorry."

Richie clears his throat. "All good, baby boy. Now - I called, actually, because well, I knew your fucking mother was going to call today, but also because um - it's Bill." 

"What about Bill?" 

"They found... his brother."

Eddie squawks, though he'll firmly deny making the noise later. " _Georgie_?" 

When he'd met Bill in first year in his first anatomy class, Bill had been quiet, withdrawn and his stutter had obscured every word that came out of his mouth. Bits and pieces through Richie and Beverly and Ben and Eddie had realized that Bill's little brother had gone missing.

Eddie realizes, with a start, that maybe that was why Bill refused to speak to or look at him for months - because he was small and young and seventeen, just like Georgie. 

"Where did they find him?" Eddie asks. The words are hollow, because after ten years, there's no way the boy is still alive. 

"In --" Richie voice breaks. Eddie inhales sharply. "In the sewers, under the well, right where Bill had always said he'd be." 

He hates being right. 

"Do they know--"

"He was missing a  _fucking arm_. He - He'd been strangled and beaten and--" Richie's voice broke again, and Eddie knew what was coming, because there were very few things that you could do to a human body that upset Richie. 

"Raped," Eddie said, and closed his eyes. He leaned back in his chair and tilted his head back. He waved away the nurse who knocked on his door, his gaze not leaving the ceiling. 

He hated the word as much as Richie did, for different reasons. 

Richie had grown up with Beverly, his best friend, his ex-girlfriend, too, who'd spent years being raped and abused by her own father. And then he'd met Eddie, had roomed with him in university and become best friends with him, and learned that he'd spent years being raped and abused by his mother. 

There was nothing Richie hated more than being unable to help someone he cared for.  

"God, Eddie, I can't fucking imagine what Bill is feeling right now. I mean I grew up with him, with him and Georgie and he was like a little brother to me, but he wasn't actually--"

"You're allowed to be in as much pain as Bill, sweetheart, it's not a competition." 

Richie laughed, sniffed. "Did you just call me sweetheart?" 

"Yeah," Eddie said, and smiled. "I just called you sweetheart."

Richie went quiet, and there was a depth to the silence that Eddie hadn't quite seen before. "You've never called me that before." 

"I would've," Eddie said, and glanced at his right hand, at the tan line he still had from a wedding band he'd stopped wearing years ago, and the tattoo on the third finger of his left hand, a wave cresting beneath his knuckle. There's a matching tattoo on Richie's finger, a joke between the two of them, a promise. Eddie hadn't realized they looked like wedding rings until Caspar had asked about it. "I would've had time to call you sweetheart if--"

"--If I hadn't left."

"Yes," Eddie whispered. He couldn't stop the words that pushed over his tongue. "Why did you leave?" 

Richie exhaled, long and slow and shakey and Eddie imagined the ground trembling as he did so, like the awakening of a very old, very ancient beast. "Because I was using." 

Eddie had known that, of course. He'd seen the poorly hidden needles (always fresh out of packages, never dirty, never used twice, never shared), and the stacks of rolling papers and mason jars filled with pot. He'd smelled what came rolling off Richie in waves when he came home - whiskey and tequila and the burnt-sugar smell of heroine and the icing sugar on his upper lip and his nose and the bright roundness to his eyes. 

"I know," Eddie said, confused. "I knew you were using, Rich." 

"What?"

Eddie laughed, though it was soft and spent, distinctly unhappy - the worst kind of laughter. "Richie, I grew up with a hypochondriac mother and I spent seven years in medical school, did you really think I didn't recognize what marijuana, excessive drinking and heroine and cocaine addictions looked like?" 

"Oh," Richie said. He made a noise like a question, and then said, "Why the fuck did you sleep with me if you knew I was using? What if--"

"You didn't."  _Get me sick._  "And I slept with you even though I knew you were using because I was in love with you, and I was too stupid to realize that addiction isn't fixed with sex and love." 

Eddie had known in a distant, indistinct kind of way that he was in love with Richie. Everyone had known. But he'd never said it outloud. 

He'd certainly never said it to Richie. 

"You were in love with me." 

"Yes," Eddie said, even though it wasn't a question. "I was."

Richie paused. "Are you still?"

"I have three degrees, two children and an ex-spouse, Richie."

"What does that have to do with you being in love with me?"

"Nothing!" Eddie snapped. "Nothing! But it should be  _everything_."  _because what if I never fell out of love with you? What if I said I loved someone but I always loved you? What if I married someone I never loved?_

"I was in love with you, too. And - before you interrupt me you fiery little nerd - I didn't just call because it was the day I knew your mom was going to call, or because of Georgie - though Bill is sitting next to me stuck between laughing and crying, which only he could make look good, you know? and he really wants me to let you know that the wake is this Friday and that he really wants you to come and that he loved your TED talk - and I also wanted to talk to you because today is also the anniversary of me being clean for seven years."

"Why seven?" Eddie asked, pride bubbling behind his ears, and knew it was a stupid question, one that Richie wouldn't have an answer to--

"Because our room was number 702 in building 7A and when we all together, there were seven of us. So. Seven years." 

Eddie's mouth fell open, and then, "Fuck, I love you." 

Richie laughed, an undercurrent of relief palpable in the sound. "I know." 

"Oh, fuck off, I am not in the mood for  _Star Wars_ references."

"You're always in the nerd for  _Star Wars_  references, Leia, don't deny it. And Eds?"

"Yeah, Rich?" 

"Your birthday is December seventh." The softness in his voice  _hurt_. "And you were seventeen when we met."  

Eddie opened his mouth to respond, and only got the dial tone. He pulled the phone away from his ear and stared at it, mouth fishing. 

"Dr. Kaspbrak, your pager's been going off for fifteen minutes, they need they you in trauma one."

He jerked and is at the door, with new gloves, demanding information on what the fuck is going on before he really processes what Nurse Blanchette had said. 

Someone barks at him, and someone else makes a quip about being glad to see his ass in those scrubs. 

And before he catches himself and raises an unimpressed eyebrow, he almost calls them Richie. 

**Author's Note:**

> fuck two fics in two days i hate it


End file.
